Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

I went into the hut and rummaged around in the ants for one of the monkey’s most prized achievements. It consisted of a lot of twigs mashed up to a pulp, flattened out into sheets, and then held together with something that had previously held a cow together.

When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places, he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren’t tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century.

I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.